


long time gone

by tiffany rawlins (wearemany)



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: 1960s, M/M, Revolutionaries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-02-22
Updated: 2004-02-22
Packaged: 2018-01-13 09:55:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1221928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearemany/pseuds/tiffany%20rawlins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are the third group of radical Americans Erik has infiltrated in two years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	long time gone

_it's been a long time coming_

_it's going to be a long time gone_

 

Erik's hair curls into the collar of his shirt, an inch that brushes the base of his neck. He's two or three weeks past needing a cut. His square-checked button-down is worn open over a silk-screened Black Panthers t-shirt. He's too straight for the longhairs, too radical for the Establishment.

Erik has always excelled at not fitting in. Charles hasn't been able to for a while now.

Erik's also too old for this crowd, but the draft-age dilettantes welcome him anyway because they've never met a survivor who didn't come to America old and gray and tired. Erik is too young to be their parents, too angry and unforgiving to be ignored. They don't question the source or scope or quality of his bloody rage, because he knows how to build bombs.

Better, he wants to set them off. He wants to damage more than property. He says he wants to overthrow the government, to witness anarchy in the streets, and they believe him because they think they agree.

Charles can always tell how few of them really mean it, but even so it's harder to distinguish just how fast and hard disillusionment will strike. They left the last commune in a hurry. Erik's expertise was suddenly a liability, a smoking gun that made scared little kids realize they were murderers, just like the kind they spat on in parades. Charles could have changed their minds but it wouldn't have been the same.

It wouldn't have been enough for Erik, who called them traitors and fled, heartbroken at all the lost opportunity. He'd lifted Charles' body into the hotel bed, hand hard between Charles' shoulderblades, then sat smoking by the window, pushing fingers against the loose resistance of the screen and melting mesh together into a solid shield.

Erik, hurt by small-thinking humans. If there had been a war that night Charles would have fought by his side.

Erik found this particular band of outcasts three months ago. They are the third group of radical Americans Erik has infiltrated in two years. Not infiltrated, Erik would say, _befriended_ , befriended and then abandoned when their politics were found lacking, their suspicions of Erik and Charles' motives too precise.

"There's something here that feels more...committed," Erik says, the first dawn after a night sitting around the battered coffee table, eating curry and talking revolution. Everyone feeling each other out, paranoid and pushy. One of the women, Leona, is a mutant but Charles doesn't think even she knows it. Leona thinks her consciousness is more raised, has no idea what an empath is or what she could do on her own. Charles watched them all, sitting quietly in his chair behind Erik, and he knew when Erik took a long toke and rested his cheek on Charles' knee that the others would assume they were lovers. They aren't always wrong.

There are five other men, two women, and Erik and Charles. The house in Flatbush that serves as base camp looks run down but isn't falling apart. Four of the nine have day jobs. The rest listen to free radio and maintain a small printing press, running off the latest manifestos from their coalition of friends and allies. The women cook and clean and make peasant shirts out of old bedsheets. Charles doesn't need telepathy to see Erik's obvious disappointment that the underground continues to so greatly resemble life in depressed villages.

Charles earns a decent amount by translating texts for a sympathetic Columbia professor, enough to cover his and Erik's share of expenses. The last house was from each according to his ability, and Erik's contribution to the collective was supposedly his labor. This time Charles isn't taking any chances with doubt borne from simple greed.

He is quiet and they trust him only because his presence is clearly non-negotiable. The two of them have a tiny bedroom on the first floor under the stairs, as there's no lift and Charles is willing to be invisible but not pathetic. Erik hides in the basement, building increasingly sophisticated ordnance that defy basic physics. The others turn their backs, willfully ignorant, as he bends metal with his mind.

"It is the great American arrogance," Erik whispers into Charles' neck one night. "They want to destroy a civilization whose power they can barely understand."

The third group in two years and they've only just stopped arguing all the time, Charles screaming into Erik's head, Erik thinking so loudly and violently that Charles can still feel leftover bright pricks of pain between his eyes. They broke each other into a million pieces and then finally into a cease-fire: Twelve more months, a study in human interaction, in war-mongering and self-made militias. In what people must lose or feel is threatened before they fight back. An experiment in self-defense, Erik says.

For Charles it is an experiment in compromise, but not with his beliefs. With Erik. He does this for Erik, because Erik with a promise of revolution on the tip of his tongue is insatiable, undeniable, so mad with inspiration Charles is almost convinced Erik's forgotten the world is his to destroy..

Erik wants to believe he'll convince Charles of the necessity of force, says he's just drawing a blueprint for the measures by which their kind will be required protect themselves. Erik thinks that if he is single-minded and Charles is devoted, they can mold their two minds into one. Erik says they are born to do something greater than coddle would-be Communists, that their gifts make "by any means necessary" a reality, a possibility. An inevitability. This is merely a training exercise.

Charles doesn't argue with that, not this year. That was the arrangement, and he can't deny they were born into something different. Something their comrades can't begin to guess at, something they've never given serious consideration to sharing here. Mutant rights will have its time, they agree on that much, not now. Soon, perhaps. Even the most radical of this group still has basic standards for equality, chiefly humanity.

"Why be humane when we are anything but human?" Erik says, lips and teeth on Charles' collarbone like a copper wire run from a battery to a trigger. _You make me like this_ , Erik thinks clearly, biting down. _You make me think we can rule the world._

**Author's Note:**

> Lyrics/title by Dylan and CSN. Beta by Punk, Elizabeth and Jamie. Men by Marvel et al.


End file.
